This paper examines the size, growth, salaries, per-pupil-costs, pupil achievement levels and cost-effectiveness of private schools, and compares these with the government school sector. Official data show a steep growth of private schooling and a corresponding rapid shrinkage in the size of the...

During COVID school closures, learning become mostly restricted to young people who had internet access at home. This paper examines internet access in India using National Sample Survey 2017-18. It probes the extent of inequality in young people's internet access across gender, caste, religion,...

This paper employs a hurdle model approach to ask whether the extent of gender bias in education expenditure within rural households in India changed over time from 1995 to 2017-18. Our most striking finding is that there has been a change over time in the way that gender bias is practiced...

This paper asks whether gender bias in education expenditure in rural India fell over the two-decade period from 1995 to 2014. We find that instead of falling over time, the channel through which gender bias is practiced changed dramatically over the 20 years. Secondly, the paper demonstrates...

This paper examines the efficacy of class-size reductions as a strategy to improve pupils' learning outcomes in India. It uses a credible identification strategy to address the endogeneity of class-size, by relating the difference in a student's achievement score across subjects to the...

This paper examines the widespread perception in India that the country has an acute teacher shortage of about one million teachers in public elementary schools, a view repeated in India's National Education Policy 2020. Using official DISE data, we show that there is hardly any net teacher...

This paper examines the relationship between teacher unionization, student achievement and teachers’ pay using a cross-section of data from private schools in India. We use differences in student mark across subjects to identify within-pupil variation in achievement and find that union...